Chapter Text
It’s always good to be home.
A comfortable double bed that he uses all by himself, never having to pull on the blanket and accidentally kicking Nicholas’ shin in his sleep—a guaranteed earful over breakfast—or having to wait for the bathroom to be empty so he can start his morning ritual. Which only consists of him taking a quick timed shower, brushing his teeth, and doing his most basic skincare. But he’s home, so none of that.
He gets to wake up a bit later because his ensuite is always empty, safe for the times his noona clogs her shower drain with her hair, he can stretch out his limbs to his heart’s desire, and he can most definitely eat breakfast in peace. No Nicholas nagging him about his bad sleeping habits or Kei-hyung practically force-feeding Taki his veggies.
Peaceful.
Quiet mornings he’s started to miss after getting used to the constant hecticness of the dorm he shares with three other guys. (Previously four, but Kyungmin’s still a sore spot he’s trying to avoid.)
His parents are out for the weekend, a little holiday to Busan with his sister, and he’s home alone, another perfect excuse for him to let himself slack off a bit. The muscles in his legs are still sore from the late-night practices lately, throat sore from attempting notes that his voice isn’t used to. He hasn’t even opened his eyes and he’s written down the perfect schedule for the day: breakfast with last night’s leftovers, watch a few episodes of anime, and maybe go out for a walk. It feels like a great day already.
Slowly, his senses start to wake. The soft fabric of his mother’s favorite fitted sheet, the faint frigidity of the blanket on top of him, feet tucked under despite the heat, his phone on silent and not buzzing—both Kei-hyung and Taki intending to spend their day on Nami Island on their offday—and Euijoo thinks, for a second, how close he is right now to feeling eternal bliss.
He opens his eyes, already excited to start a day that he’s going to spend by doing nothing. As he stares at the ceiling, hands on his stomach, staring at the light on top of him, he feels an uneasiness starting to settle over him. The same kind of drop that he felt whenever his sister made him turn down the downstairs light when they were young, like something’s going to come out of the dark and chase him to his bedroom. Someone, something, is in the room with him.
Euijoo knows whoever, whatever, is watching him is sitting on his desk chair. He never turned off his monitor last night, when he was watching a nature documentary about the Japanese red fox. He was trying to improve his proficiency in the language, but he nearly fell asleep in the middle of it all. The display is still in idle mode now, his bright screen saver reflecting off the ceiling.
He honestly doesn’t know which is worse: a living person watching him sleep with God-knows-what intent or a spirit. Both would still make him pee his pants but only one of them could kill him.
The only weapon he has is an old baseball bat in his closet, propped up against the wall, hiding beneath rows of long coats he’s outgrown. Reaching said closet would realistically take him four strides, which he thinks is 2 seconds he cannot waste because a grown man can absolutely incapacitate him in those two seconds. Also, maybe it’s nothing and he’s just imagining a threat that isn’t there.
He takes a deep breath and turns his head to the direction of his desk, telling himself that it’s probably nothing and that he doesn’t have to worry. But as something starts to take form on his periphery, he feels his breath hitch in his throat. So I’m going to die, he thinks to himself, I should’ve ran to the closet to grab the bat, I—
The person is sitting on his chair, slightly slumped, elbows on his knees. A grown man in his bedroom, he’s obviously going to die. He blinks his eyes a couple of times, willing them to try and focus. Maybe if his desperate pleas to spare him sound distressed enough, this home invader will let him go, maybe he’ll be able to catch his features and file a report or avoid said man for the rest of his life. As his view comes into focus and he catches the man’s eyes, he furrows his eyebrows in confusion, he can recognize those eyes anywhere, are they not—
“Hi, Juju, it’s Nicholas, your group mate from the future.”
-
Oh, okay, he’s started to invade my dreams now, as if occupying my every waking moment isn’t enough, he’s now living in my subconscious too.
This isn’t his Nicholas. Not the one whose shin he’s kicked about a hundred million times in his sleep, also not the Nicholas he always yells to hurry up in the bathroom whenever he needs to do a number two but he’s inside doing whatever and taking his sweet, sweet time. His mind, for some reason, decides to make a different version of him. Blond hair, sharper eyes, jaw too; wow, his brain is somehow able to conjure up a more attractive version of his friend.
He closes his eyes again, feels the need to wake up now so he’ll have time to laze off before the sun sets. Though he still intends to do nothing, he still has to be awake to be able to do exactly that.
“Are you going back to sleep?”
In his dream, Nicholas has much better Korean. Some intonations still sound like he’s trying to actively fight off the Mandarin tones, but he doesn’t mumble out the words, he’s confident in his pronunciation. Nice, Euijoo thinks, my brain’s a language perfectionist.
Euijoo hums, closes his eyes again, ready for the scenery around him to change.
“Juju, I told you I came from the future and your response is to sleep it off?”
He doesn’t answer, choosing to keep his eyes shut as he tries to change the scenery. Maybe this Nicholas could visit him somewhere else, definitely not his messy childhood bedroom. They could have a talk at one of the parks near the Han River, a quiet place by the shade where they usually go whenever practice runs too late, or when they need someplace with shadows they can disappear into. Not weighed down by anything.
A soft object lands on his face with a thud, the tip of his nose feels a little sore from the impact. Wait. He blinks his eyes open again. There’s something he remembers reading from the Internet, you can’t feel pain when you dream, so whenever he feels like he’s stuck in one, he’d pinch his arm—that’s what everybody does. This is a dream, the cushion thrown to his face shouldn’t leave any sensation of pain. So, if he feels it then that means.
This time, he’s prepared.
He leaps out of bed at record speed and runs—more like, ungracefully gallops—towards his closet, opens the doors and reaches into it to grab the baseball bat his dad bought for him when he was seven. Too light and probably too brittle to do any real damage, but he perseveres. When he turns around, stupid small bat in his grip, otherworldly Nicholas is two steps away from him, arms outstretched.
“Juju.”
“Who are you?”
“I literally just told yo—”
“You’re not Nicholas.” Euijoo’s grip on the bat tightens. His eyes flick to his phone, fuck, bedside table, he has to be quicker than whoever this fake Nicholas is. Real Nicholas is fast on his feet—years of badminton—but Euijoo still has his fencing steps ingrained in his brain somewhere, he can dodge his arm and leap to his phone. But he has to leave the bat behind. And between a phone and a bat, he thinks the bat can give more damage.
This Nicholas is still shorter than him, height seems to be around Actual Nicholas. His hair’s blonde, longer, swept up, revealing his forehead. That’s a different habit, the Nicholas that Euijoo knows loves hiding behind his hair or his mask or the hood of his sweatshirt. He’s also bulkier, muscles filling out in places that Euijoo didn’t know had muscles.
“Yes, I am, do I not look like Nicholas?”
“You do!” He admits. If Nicholas worked out more and had more money to spend—he definitely did not buy that shirt with whatever allowance the agency’s giving us for lunch and dinner. Euijoo thinks. “But you’re not him, Nicholas is in—”
“Taiwan, I know,” the impostor replies, guards still most definitely up, afraid he’ll get whacked on the head with a kid’s baseball bat, “mandatory military service, four months, 110 days, actually, but who’s counting, right?”
Euijoo tries not to glance at the desk calendar beside his monitor, where there’s two dates circled in red pen in August. The day of his discharge and another one a few days after—the date of his arrival back in Seoul. Yeah, nobody’s counting. Obviously. He also doesn’t have it in his phone.
“You’re seriously freaking me out,” Euijoo says, ready to swing, “you’re not Nicholas, you can’t be Nicholas because he’s not here and even if you were him, how’d you get in my house and why’s everything you’re wearing so expensive and why—”
“I told you, I’m Nicholas but I’m from the future.”
Even though he didn’t technically graduate high school to fully focus on training, he knows that the concept of time travel is a far-fetched one. Impossible. There are a lot of complications, no, not complications, it messes things up. Seeing a version of Nicholas who’s not the Nicholas from his timeline already messes up the current timeline; consequences, alterations in the sequence of events.
Impostor Nicholas clicks his tongue. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Euijoo questions; his palms are getting sweaty, baseball bat slipping in his grip.
“You have your thinking face on.”
“I don’t.” His eyes go over the tiniest details on Nicholas’ face. The faded mole by his lips, the curve of his eyes. His gaze trails down, to his arm, the parts that aren’t covered by his outfit. Then, eventually, of course, the raised tissue on his forearm, an old healed scar. Nicholas has never given him the full story, Euijoo never dared to ask. But it’s there. In the open. Proof.
Nicholas—or so he claims—scoffs. “You’re still thinking.”
“You can’t expect me not to think.” Euijoo licks his lips, repositions his grip on the bat. “You’re—you’re him?”
“Wow, that easy?”
He doesn’t think he needs to ponder on his next move that much, so he swings the bat at full power, hitting the impostor right on his arm. He, naturally, flinches away, hand quickly rubbing over the sore spot on his bicep. “For God’s sake, Euijoo!”
“What was that?”
Bulky Nicholas scowls at him, still gripping his bicep. It couldn’t have been that bad, it’s been a while since Euijoo played baseball with his dad and the last time he tried with friends was ages ago. “What was what? You’re the one who hit me with a bat.”
“No, before my name, what did you say?”
It wasn’t Korean. And it wasn’t Mandarin, either. It’s something else, familiar, but foreign at the same time. Euijoo has heard it before, but it hasn’t clicked. Like he’s trying to piece together a Lego figure but he skipped a page.
“Oh.” Nicholas sucks in his bottom lip. “Uhm, Japanese—you’re, uh, not that familiar with it yet.”
He instinctively loosens his grip on his weapon of choice. Japanese, Nicholas—again, so he claims—is speaking Japanese. It’s a slip of tongue, a habit. Something he probably got used to overtime, if he’s actually who he says he is. Euijoo backtracks, retracing his memory from a few minutes ago. When Blonde Nicholas was still sitting behind his desk with that small lopsided smile on his face and he said: your group mate from the future.
If that’s the truth and if the Japanese is also a hint then—
“Our debut plan.” Euijoo breathes out. “You—you said you’re my group mate from the future and you’re speaking Japanese, so our debut plan—”
“Yes.” Nicholas cuts him off. A substantial amount of weight is lifted from his shoulders but the doubt in his heart lingers, its claw still comfortably nestled in his guts.
“Okay, I’ll ignore whatever question I have about how you got here but,” Euijoo takes the appearance of this Nicholas in again, still in disbelief that another version of him is actually here; older, bulkier—not wiser, for sure. “Why are you here?”
Real Nicholas—the one he texts every weekend for updates, the one he’s been spending the last ten months with—is in Taiwan, completing his compulsory military service. He wanted, wants, to get it out of the way before they debut. It’s coming, all the higher-ups tell them assuringly whenever hope starts diminishing and uncertainty creeps up on them like an old friend, it will come.
Nicholas is an optimist. Always has been. Euijoo thinks that’s what happens to guys like him—extroverts who have always known what they’re capable of, who know their talent and guts will cushion their fall, if they ever do—they know they’ll make it eventually. That’s why he signed up for the military so young, he doesn’t want the inevitable call to halt his activity and pause his dreams.
Euijoo, however, has always been the opposite.
And he has a gut feeling that the Nicholas who’s standing in front of him now knows that. That whatever pessimism he has right now, he will eventually carry to his future, to his job, to his dream. That’s probably why he’s here now. Whatever he’s trying to change, whatever he’s trying to convince Euijoo to do—it all probably stems from one of Euijoo’s fears.
Which one; he doesn’t know yet.
There’s a visible shift in his features when Euijoo asks. Softening, glimmering. He doesn’t know this Nicholas yet, doesn’t believe he’ll know this Nicholas eventually. But he could’ve sworn he recognized the expression he’s sporting.
“You’re having doubts.” Nicholas declares; confidence dripping in his every word. Doubts, he has no idea what that word even means—he still asks Euijoo to order food for him whenever they go out together. But he’s here now, throwing out Korean words like they’re nothing. On one side, he’s proud; the other, creeped out.
Euijoo takes a deep breath and finally lets his arms down, no baseball bat as a threat. Just him. Walls down, unguarded. “What doubts?”
“About the group, you don’t know if you want to do it. Hell, you don’t even know why you’re still in the company,” Nicholas says, “your parents are out in Busan, Taki and Kei-hyung are hanging out, Kyungmin’s been out for a while, I’m not here. You said yes to your parents’ invitation to go to Busan but backed out at the last minute, flu, you said, but that’s not it, isn’t it, Juju?”
“I did have the flu.”
“Yes, sure, but you stayed back because you wanted to have an option. They’re making you sign those papers first thing Monday morning and you’re thinking about going there tomorrow and backing out.”
He hasn’t spoken about it, and isn’t planning to. It’s a struggle that he’ll try to battle himself. So Nicholas—adult Nicholas, not the one locked in a camp sleeping on a bunk bed—shouldn’t know this. This well-guarded secret that he keeps close to his chest from shame; him wanting to withdraw from the plan when he’s so close to it being real. So, of course, naturally, the best way to react to his secret being told back to him like it’s general knowledge is to drop the baseball bat and dodge the much older guy in front of him. The only logical way to do so—for Euijoo—is to recall his fencing steps from all the way back in middle school and leap to grab his phone from the nightstand.
And of course, naturally, he forgets that a fully-grown adult male with years of experience under his belt of knowing his ins and outs—or so he claims—can predict his next move. Nicholas grabs the phone from Euijoo’s grip and when he fights back, trying to claw it out of his hand, he falls towards the bed. He probably looks stupid; sleepy eyes, red face, defeated.
In a last-ditch effort, he parts his lips and starts screaming. And of course, Nicholas knows him enough to slap a hand over his mouth to shut him up.